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Urbiflock

What is Urbiflock?

UrbiFlock is a framework sculpted for the development of pervasive social network applications: an emerging type of applications that enable spontaneous interactions of people by means of handheld devices (such as their cell phones). These applications exploit the colocation of a number of mobile devices in the proximity to enable social interaction on the move.

Urbiflock is a Facebook-like application framework for mobile devices written in AmbientTalk. As in Facebook, users that join Urbiflock can meet other users and interact with them. For example users may broadcast announcements to each other, they can browse one another’s profile, launch interactive polls, etc. The framework takes care of managing a user’s social networks, called “flocks”. A flock represents a loosely-defined group of users. A flock can be compared to a Facebook group (for example, a group of your old classmates), but it additionally allows for the definition of groups of proximate flockrs (for example, a group of all of your friends that are currently nearby).

Similar to Facebook, users can build applications and plug them into the Urbiflock framework. Several core applications are currently available in the Urbiflock framework, such as flock creators and profile viewers. The framework is currently still under development, which is why these pages mostly lists development information thus far.

Terminology

  • Flockr: a user of the Urbiflock framework
  • Flock: a group of users
  • To flock: to become part of a group

Urbiflock architecture

The architecture of the Urbiflock framework shown below is divided in three layers: applications, Urbiflock core, and Urbiflock infrastructure. :uf:urbiflock_architecture.png

The application layer includes several core applications which are currently available in the framework such as flock and profile editors, and several users applications such as I rate you (IR8U) that allows users to ask proximate users to rate them on a certain subject, and Guanotes. The Urbiflock's core is composed of three main facilities specially designed to enable social interactivity and deal with the highly dynamic environment to which mobile devices exposes them: flockr, user profile and the TOTAM framework for flock communications. The infrastructure layer consists of three low-level abstractions on which the framework core is based: a RETE engine which orchestrates the flock composition, and the service discovery and communication APIs to discover and communicate with nearby applications, respectively.

In the rest of this subsection we list the relevant parts of the Urbiflock framework.

  • Flockr: A flockr represents a user in the framework.
  • Profile: manage user's profile and cache profiles of other flockrs
  • Flock: a loosely defined group of users.
  • Characteristic Functions: “functions” that determine whether or not a user is proximate.
    • isNearby: physical proximity
    • isFriend: static encoding of friendship relationships
    • doesProfileMatch: tests an attribute of a user's profile, form ATTR OP VAL, where ATTR is e.g. age, name, gender, hobbies, …
    • combinators: and, or, not
  • Application: define the API of an “application object”. What follows is the list of applications in Urbiflock.
    • Flock Viewer: a viewer and editor to view existing flocks and to create new flocks.
    • Application Viewer: a viewer and editor to view existing applications and install/delete them.
    • Profile Viewer: a viewer and editor to view existing flockr profiles and to update your profile.
    • IFlockU: a friend suggestor based on profile similarity and time spent in proximity.
    • Guanotes: a messenger application that sends post-its to flocks.
    • IR8U: an application that allows you to rate your friends.

Applications

  • Flock Viewer: a viewer and editor to view existing flocks and to create new flocks.
  • Application Viewer: a viewer and editor to view existing applications and install/delete them.
  • Profile Viewer: a viewer and editor to view existing flockr profiles and to update your profile.
  • IFlockU: a friend suggestor based on profile similarity and time spent in proximity.
  • Guanotes: a messenger application that sends post-its to flocks.
  • IR8U: an application that allows you to rate your friends.

Target Platforms

Rather than building a platform-independent framework, our aim is to assist in the rapid development of pervasive social networking applications. The Urbiflock framework has been entirely written in the AmbientTalk language. As such, no configuration is required to be able to quickly script new applications on it once AmbientTalk is running on the target platform.

AmbientTalk requires a regular J2SE Java Virtual Machine supporting version 1.3 or higher. The implementation also runs on the Java 2 micro edition (J2ME) platform, under the connected device configuration (CDC).

We have done some test to deploy our framework on HTC touch cruise pda's. In order to configure your HTC Touch device for our framework you can follow the instruction here.

We are currently working on deploying our framework on HTC Hero, a phone running on the Android platform.

Development

at/urbiflock.1258551221.txt.gz · Last modified: 2009/11/18 14:35 (external edit)